State of the union comic

First off, thanks for all the topwebcomics.com votes, (vote link) we got the comic into the top 10, which is amazing since the guys who usually dominate that position offer a post incentive with every comic that goes up, usually nudie pics of their female characters. Especially Spying with Lana, which you should check out if you’re not at work and enjoy well drawn naked people.

I saw some other webcomicers on twitter post some year over year stats, so I thought I’d do the same. I’ve got roughly 5X the traffic since this time last year, so thanks for sticking around everyone. Still, a year ago the comic was only a few months old so while my current traffic level isn’t bad for a relatively young comic, it’s not something I’m going to be making a living off any time soon. So my goal for this year is to get another 5x increase in traffic. I don’t know how realistic that is, but I really would like to escape the cube farm and do this for a living, which of course means more comics each week, so at some point I’ll probably add some ad banners to the page (I know, ads suck but I won’t allow any annoying flash ads or any epilepsy inducing gifs) and that’s not going to pay my mortgage, but at some point my host will probably say “Hey I know we said ‘unlimited’ bandwidth, but… here’s a bill anyway” so the ads might defray that cost and maybe even pay for some advertising of my own.

I don’t have a donate button or any other source of income off the page yet, except for a few T-shirt sales… I should really link the store at some point… but if you enjoy the comic and want to help out, for now the best thing you can do is share it with your friends, facebook, twitter, whatever, and hopefully people will find it and decide to stick around.

I definitely think merch is the best way for you to not only get some bucks but also some recognition. Once people see the various items (purchased by fans) they will want to see what all the fuss is about. Thus you get the name of the comic out there and make a little scratch. As for the ads as long as they don’t overwhelm or bog down the site go for it. Though I will add one request for no click-through ads.

Definitely look into merchandising. Randall Munroe of XKCD makes a rather decent living off of his site, mostly through merchandising, I believe. Of course his material lends itself better to t-shirts and other clothing.

Merchandising is a good idea- if you can get the costs balancing – more for getting your name out than for making money at this point, though. Check around with your successful “competition” and see what they’re doing. And yeah- success would mean you’d have to update more. Darn it. *heh*

I’ve been voting for you every day, but you’re still slipping back, darn it. Still – last month you were ranked in the sixties. Now you’re still in the top 20. That’s pretty frikking good, dude.

I really appreciate the votes. It’s hard to compete with 1) Comics that update more often and 2) the ones who have voting incentives with almost every update. Still, top 20 is nothing to sneeze at. Really I’m pleased that I’m consistently in the top 100.

Good idea on avoiding the flash ads. Some of the webcomics I read have this plaintive little message:

This site is supported by advertising revenue. If you use an ad blocker, we’d appreciate it if you disabled it on our site.

That’s the only message I ever see, because I’m not going to enable their ads. I don’t run an ad-blocker, just a script-blocker which has the same end result on a flash ad. If they didn’t surround the webcomic with insane, high-speed, CPU-slowing ads that make it impossible to read and enjoy the webcomic, I would have no problem with viewing the ads. I’ll even click on them, if it’s something I might like. Static ads will serve you far better, for people like me. I can actually see them.

You might just want a small donate tab, it could be out of the way for the passerby, but I know that I would probably give 100 bucks a year or so, not bad when I make 1100 dollars a year as a high-schooler.

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I'll just leave these here for your convenience - and obviously to drive a little traffic my way. Bottom line is If you like the comic, vote, share and tell others! Maybe someone else who will enjoy the comic will find their way here.